New research reveals people prefer AI to make decisions

As technology continues to integrate into various aspects of public and private decision-making, understanding public perception and satisfaction and ensuring the transparency and accountability of algorithms will be key to their acceptance and effectiveness. 

With this, researchers from Portsmouth University and the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition studied public attitudes towards algorithmic versus human decision-making and examined the impact of potential discrimination on these preferences.

An online decision experiment was used to study the preference for human or AI decision makers, where the earnings of two people could be redistributed between them after a series of tasks were performed. 

Over 200 participants from the UK and Germany were asked to vote on whether they wanted a human or an AI algorithm to make the decision, determining how much money they earned.

The researchers found that, contrary to previous findings, over 60 per cent of participants favoured the algorithm, irrespective of potential discrimination.